All the Difference
by luvscharlie
Summary: Hermione joins Harry and Ron in researching what transformed Tom Riddle into a monster by going back to the night it all began. Trio-Tom Riddle Gen!fic Originally written for the hermione ldws competition over on Live Journal. There was a 1000 word max.


_All the Difference by luvscharlie_

"_All things truly wicked start from innocence._" -- Ernest Hemingway

This wasn't what Hermione had expected when she agreed to help Harry and Ron in their assignment for the Auror Department. Yet how could she refuse a request to research the most feared wizard of all time and what had turned him the way he was? The answer was simple; she could not.

The idea was brilliant really, performing research into what might have turned the orphaned little boy who was Tom Riddle into the handsome young man who charmed nearly all who met him during his days at Hogwarts, and then into the monster who became Lord Voldemort. It was her own invention that had made this research even possible. Therefore it only made sense that she assist once Harry retrieved the memory from a very aged Mrs. Cole, former caretaker of the Muggle orphanage in which Tom Riddle had grown from innocent baby to troubled boy; from troubled, albeit charming boy into a monster who bore little resemblance to a man.

Hermione had created a much improved variation of the Pensieve. Though the Pensieve that sat atop Harry's desk looked no different from the one that Dumbledore had kept in his office back at Hogwarts, what it did was far different. No longer was one forced to simply stand back and watch a memory play out before them. They could now interact with the individuals inside the memory, question them, touch the things and people that were there.

One could make no mistake in its function, however. It was not a Time-turner. Their interactions with the memory and those contained therein were unable to alter the past in any way. It only gave them a more hands-on way of studying it.

Ron took Hermione's hand and they followed Harry's lead, pressing forward until their faces touched the shining, shimmering, silvery substance swirling in the basin, and they were falling forward, their feet no longer touching the floor of the office.

And then, they were there, inside the Muggle orphanage with a warm, crackling fire blazing in the hearth as the harsh snow swirled outside on this cold and desolate New Year's Eve. The irony was not lost on Hermione that on this date when Muggles were readying themselves to wipe the slate clean, making resolutions to start a year anew, fresh, better, _this_ particular child was making his entry into a world in which he would bring about so much despair and destruction.

She wondered if babies were ever simply born evil. She didn't believe so. Where, then, had this child gone so wrong?

A young woman, a girl really, no older than 18, came down the stairs from an upper floor with a grim look on her face. She faced the trio as though their sudden appearance there was nothing out of the ordinary. "She's gone." Those two words said with such finality confirmed that the aged Mrs. Cole's memory had not been what it once was, and that what Harry had procured would offer them fewer answers than they had hoped.

Hermione heard a high-pitched gurgle and noticed the bundle nestled in the crook of the girl's arm. "May I?" she asked.

The girl nodded and Hermione held out her arms to take the child nestled in the warm blankets. As was the way of mothers, Hermione had never held a child she found more beautiful than her own—or at least she had not until that precise moment.

Tom Riddle had been quite beautiful as a baby. He did not possess the wrinkled, red skin that had been prominent on every newborn Hermione had ever seen. His skin was the colour of alabaster, and his dark, rich curls contrasted starkly with it. His eyes were open and alert, not like those of a typical baby, even one of magical blood, seeming to take in everything around him with interest.

Ron and Harry commenced asking questions of the adults who had come into the room, but Hermione found an old wooden rocker and dragged it over by the fire. She sat with the baby in her arms, counting each of his ten fingers as they curled around her own. She pulled back the blankets to see that the child before her looked no different than any other baby, except for his beauty. She began to rock the child in her arms, marveling at the warmth of his skin, as yet unblemished by any of the harsh realities of life, and it was hard to imagine this child had become something so evil.

She began to hum a lullaby that she had often hummed to her daughter, and the child cooed up at her, his expression alarmingly aware, and then he yawned, no longer able to fight the closing of his eyelids and drifting away in peaceful sleep.

For the first time, Hermione felt true sympathy, not for the monster this child had become, but for the child who had been cheated of a mother's arms to hold him, to offer comfort when knees were scraped or hearts were broken. As she brushed a dark curl from the baby's forehead she had to wonder if it might have made all the difference.


End file.
